Adania Shibli
In October 2023, the Litprom award ceremony for Adania Shibli’s novel Tafsil Thanawi (Minor Detail) at the Frankfurt Book Fair was cancelled, together with her other events at the fair. In “Once, the Monster Was so Kind”, published in the first issue of Berlin Review in February 2024, Shibli writes about those weeks for the first time.
The essay opens with the loss of words: a writer who, in the face of the violence in Palestine/Israel, can no longer finish reading the news or find her own language. From there, Shibli turns to the press coverage and institutional decisions that led to the cancellation, and to what she calls the “untruths” circulated about her and her novel. She reflects on the nameless, faceless characters that run through all her fiction, and on how they mirror the way Arabs and other subalterns are represented by the dominant in reality.
Literature, for Shibli, is a matter of intimacy, reflection and generosity rather than a tool for change. Recalling the Frankfurt Book Fair’s statement on making more space for other voices, she notes that “in Arabic, the word for literature and ethics is one and the same, Adab.” She also explains the literary questions behind Minor Detail: how to write with a language that can be attacked, broken or abused, and why she resists reading the novel as a record of real events.
The essay closes with a childhood memory of walking through the dark towards a feared “monster” to reach the light switch, and with two fears that no such courage can overcome: that the world will never be better than yesterday, and that one day she might wake up without language.
Read the full essay in Berlin Review →
Read Mehmet Hakkı Suçin’s Turkish translation, “İki Korku Arasında” →
Adania Shibli, “Once, the Monster Was so Kind,” Berlin Review, Nº 1, February 2024. Turkish translation by Mehmet Hakkı Suçin, “İki Korku Arasında,” first published in BirGün, 16 January 2024 — the first version of the text to appear in print. The Arabic text, «بين خوفين», was published in al-Araby al-Jadeed on 18 January 2024.